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Pond and a Puck Are Enough for Hockey Purists

While the National Hockey League was putting on its annual All-Star Game in the climate-controlled comfort of the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, 320 hardier players gathered in this little Canadian village (population 1,200) to play hockey the old-fashioned way -- on bumpy natural ice, in falling snow, in face-stinging wind and biting, toe-numbing cold.

They were paid less than the N.H.L. stars -- the weekend cost them money, in fact -- but they had more fun. They also got to drink beer between periods if they chose.

Plaster Rock (also home of the world's largest fiddlehead ferns) is named after the gypsum that was mined here in the 19th century; it's about 50 miles east of Presque Isle, Me., and in a different time zone. The biggest local employer is the Fraser sawmill.

What drew everyone here was the third annual World Pond Hockey Championships -- a three-day tournament in which four-man teams compete, in as many as 20 simultaneous games, both for world eminence and for a wooden replica of the Stanley Cup fashioned of homegrown maple by a local craftsman, Ab Beaulieu. The event is a fund-raiser, with sponsors like Fraser and Labatt's and with each team paying a $300 entry fee. Most of the money is earmarked for replacing the village's sole indoor ice rink, built in 1967 and now so antiquated that the electrical system goes on the blink periodically, and so rickety that someone has to shovel the roof every time it snows.

The notion of charging people to play hockey outdoors in order to build a better indoor facility is the brainchild of Danny Braun, the director of community development for Plaster Rock and the tournament's chief organizer. ''It's a little ironic,'' he said while standing in World Pond Hockey headquarters, a heated tent -- complete with souvenir counter and a skate-sharpening station -- pitched right on the ice of Roulston Lake, where the championships take place. ''But it's a good cause, and everybody loves pond hockey.''

In its purest form, pond hockey -- hockey played outdoors and anywhere you won't fall in; on a pond, a river, a lake, a slough, or frozen patch of prairie -- has almost no rules, except for a generally understood edict against body checking and lifting the puck. You drop a pair of boots at one end of a patch of ice and another pair at the other end. Those are the goals; there are no out of bounds except where the ice runs out or the snow piles up. There are no designated timeouts -- you play until it's dark or until you can't feel your toes anymore -- and you play with as many, or as few, people as happen to show up. You can try to keep score, but nobody will remember it.

Plaster Rock has necessarily introduced a few regulations. The games -- 30 minutes long, with a five-minute break between halves -- are played on 22 sheets of ice that are roughly 140 feet by 70 feet (or three-quarters the size of an N.H.L. rink) and have been scooped out of the snow. The goals are wooden frames 6 feet wide (the width of a standard hockey net) and 10 inches high; you can't block them by laying your stick down full length across the ice (nor can you use a goalie stick).

Each ice sheet has a ''monitor,'' who keeps score and awards penalty points for infractions, and a couple of ''puck chasers,'' grammar school children who retrieve errant shots. The teams are limited to four a side because, among other things, that's how many can comfortably fit, along with their equipment and beer, in an average-size car and not get on one another's nerves during the endless drive to Plaster Rock.

Event Has Worldwide Appeal

Teams are not divided according to age or ability. ''We thought about that,'' Mr. Braun said. ''But then we figured people would just lie, and it works out pretty well the way it is.'' There were 80 teams this year -- up from 64 last year and 40 the year before that -- and all the available slots were filled in a single day last May. Mr. Braun said he has had inquiries from some 50 new teams that want to play next year, among them groups from Egypt and Bermuda. ''That would really make it the World Pond Hockey Championship,'' he said.

Many of the teams were local, or what passes for local in New Brunswick -- within a long day's trip. But there were also teams from Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, as well as four teams from the United States -- one from Boston and three from around Washington (all guys, as it happens, who play at the same Rockville, Md., rink every Thursday night). A fifth United States team, from Nashville, was supposed to play but dropped out at the last minute because, many speculated, the wife of one of the players put her foot down.

The team that traveled the farthest was the West Coast Pine Riders, from Vancouver, British Columbia; the players made a week of it, stopping off in New York for an Islanders-Canucks game before heading up to Plaster Rock. The team from farthest north was the Cluckin' Puck Loggers, who drove three days from Sioux Lookout, Ontario, which is on the 50th parallel. ''There's us, just one more town, and that's it,'' Warren Hobbs, the team captain, said.

Mr. Hobbs was impressed by the ice grooming at Plaster Rock: the little snow cats with whirling brushes in front to clear snow off the surface, and the volunteers from the local fire department who sprayed it with water at the end of each session. ''These are world-class conditions,'' he said. ''Up in Sioux Lookout, we just shovel.''

The oldest team was the River Boys, whose name also included a slightly vulgar reference to the players' age; they totaled two centuries' worth of accumulated hockey wisdom, and their jerseys were an appropriate shade of gray. The most photographed team was the Chiefs, from Moncton, New Brunswick, who wore long wigs (in the style of the Hanson brothers, from the movie ''Slap Shot'') and hammed it up shamelessly, distributing complimentary beers to onlookers. The sentimental favorites were the Royal Rebels, a women's team from Plaster Rock, consisting of a schoolteacher, a student, a bus driver and a cook.

All these players -- even those from the United States -- found themselves caught up in something that was in part a small-town festival and in part a collective exercise in nostalgia.

The origins of hockey are debated in Canada with almost theological intensity. The game began, depending on which sect you belong to, either around 1810 in Windsor, Nova Scotia, where it was played by boys at King's College School, or a few years later in Halifax, or in Kingston, Ontario, where it was played by British Army officers. The rules of the game more or less as we know it began to be codified in 1875, which is around the time the technology for creating artificial ice was developed.

Early indoor rinks were mostly curiosities, however, and were seldom used for hockey. When the N.H.L. was founded in 1917, only one of the four teams then, Toronto, skated on artificial ice; the rest played in cold, barnlike buildings with what amounted to frozen floors. Nowadays the game has been thoroughly refrigerated, and in many Canadian towns it is played all year long and practically around the clock, under the lights, in climate-controlled rinks, with coolant pulsing under the ice.

Few people regularly play hockey outdoors anymore, in Canada or anywhere else, but pond hockey has nevertheless persisted in the Canadian national imagination, and was celebrated, for instance, in last November's outdoor N.H.L. game in Edmonton between the Oilers and the Montreal Canadiens. Outdoor hockey is the fabric of legend, a reminder that in its origins, hockey is to Canada what baseball is to the United States: a mythic, pastoral game. Gordie Howe on the frozen sloughs of Saskatchewan; Rocket Richard, Jean Beliveau and Guy Lafleur on the lakes of Quebec; Bobby Orr on Parry Sound; and Wayne Gretzky on the backyard rink in Brantford, Ontario -- playing outside teaches ''creativity,'' or so the keepers of the flame believe, and that's why nobody today can pass or stick-handle the way they used to.

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For the first two days in Plaster Rock (the tournament begins on a Friday evening and lasts through Sunday afternoon), it snowed more or less steadily, and in the falling flakes Roulston Lake, a little oval near the center of town, rimmed with tall, frosted pine trees, looked prettier than a five-dollar bill -- a Canadian five-dollar bill, that is, which has an engraving of a pond hockey scene on the back.

The snow was not as heavy as it was last year, when a blizzard almost whited-out the final day of the tournament, but it was enough to slow the puck down and take the edge away from some of the more talented players. The key to winning was sound positional play on defense (most teams were careful to keep one man back, as a kind of roving goaltender) and, on offense, quick hard shots from outside.

The definition of success for many teams at Plaster Rock is just surviving until the final day, when the field is whittled from 80 to 32 (then, in successive games, down to 2).

Danny Melanson, the Chiefs' captain, promised that if he and his teammates made it that far, they would dye their wigs red. In the end, they didn't need to. The Royal Rebels didn't make it either (though they were never shut out, as their captain, Tammy Tatlock, announced); same for the River Boys and the Loggers.

Among those who did were two teams that everyone watched out for from the first night -- the Boston Danglers, an exceptionally smooth-skating foursome who are really Canadians, as some locals were quick to point out (they met while playing for Merrimack College, in Massachusetts, in the mid-90's, and have since settled there); and the Frozen Four, the strongest Washington team, carried by Gary Yavanovich, who in his other life is a major in the Air Force.

By the final morning it was bitterly cold, with the thermometer reading 7 below zero. The games were slow getting started because not enough monitors could be found and some of the teams were reluctant to leave the warmth of the tent. (Many of the players and most of the tournament volunteers -- almost half the population of Plaster Rock -- had stayed up late the night before, drinking and dancing at a World Pond Hockey social at the high school.)

On the hard, wind-scoured ice, skating was faster, passes sharper, stick-handling more inventive. Without slap shots and body checks, offsides and icing calls, hockey here shed a lot of baggage -- the bumping and grinding, the dumping and chasing -- and took on a new and simpler guise, quicker and more elemental than the version you see in the N.H.L. (or even in high school and college, for that matter); it was a little bit like playground basketball, a little like experimental dance. Unlike the N.H.L., currently suffering from a scoring drought, Plaster Rock produced goals in flurries and averaged better than 25 a game.

The Danglers and the Frozen Four met in the semifinals, and it was a hockey game to treasure, one you would have paid to watch. The Danglers adopted a kind of diamond formation (one man high, two in the middle, one back) that created a lot of fast breaks on offense, then quickly turned into a pond version of the neutral-zone trap; they jammed the Frozen Four up in their own end and led at the half, 12-7.

During the break Major Yavanovich made some adjustments and his team came out flying, zinging diagonal cross-ice passes and shooting quickly, whenever there was an opening. The Frozen Four scored four unanswered goals in the first few minutes, pulled even, then dropped behind again before clawing within one.

The final score was 18-17, Danglers, and when it was over, all those watching knew they had seen hockey every bit as good as what the All-Stars were playing in St. Paul.

Braving the Cold to the End

This game was so thrilling that the final -- between the Danglers and the Pepsi Vipers, hometown favorites, of a sort, because the captain, Dave Myles, used to live in Plaster Rock -- was a bit of an anticlimax, with the Boston team winning, 24-7.

A couple of hundred loyal fans stayed to the end even so, stamping their feet and hugging themselves for warmth. It was so windy that one of a pair of giant inflatable Labatt's cans toppled. And so cold that the game's youngest spectator, an 18-month-old named Alexander, was heaped with blankets in his little sled until he resembled a medium-size boulder; so cold that beer froze in the can and had to be squeezed out like an ice pop. The announcer, Danny MacLean, declared over the public-address system, ''You know, it's not pond hockey unless the lobes of your ears turn a little bit white and a little bit hard.''

Beforehand, 12-year-old Jessica Gagnon, a seventh grader from Plaster Rock, sang the Canadian national anthem, unaccompanied, then ''The Star-Spangled Banner.''

The closing ceremony was pleasingly modest and politely proper, not unlike Canada itself, come to think of it. The mayor of Plaster Rock, Robin DeMerchant, shuffled out on the ice, as did the local member of Parliament, Andy Savoy (who had also entered a team in the tournament).

After some brief remarks were made, a uniformed trooper from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police handed the wooden cup to Cooper Naylor, the Danglers' captain, who skated it around the ice with his teammates. The crowd thumped applause with gloved or mittened hands, then proceeded briskly to the parking lot.

''This could never happen in the United States,'' observed a maniacal fan who had driven all the way from Boston. ''People just walking out on the ice -- can you imagine what the insurance companies would think of that? And standing around while pucks whiz past? They'd make you wear a helmet.''